We've been working behind the scenes on a revamp of our web site. It went live today (http://folding.stanford.edu/home). This is part of our larger plan to make FAH more friendly and easy to use, especially to non-experts.

With that said, we're now thinking about next steps to make FAH more fun and appealing to experts, such as computer enthusiasts and gamers. We're in the early stages of deciding what would be useful there. If you have ideas, please do give us some feedback. As always, we can't implement everything, but we are curious to see what people think.

With that said, we're now thinking about next steps to make FAH more fun and appealing to experts, such as computer enthusiasts and gamers.

I moderate a PC hardware/enthusiast forum with just over 25,000 subscribers, and I've tried selling the idea of F@H somewhat unsuccessfully for the following reasons:Enthusiasts love comparing benchmarks of their hardware (see:http://hwbot.org/, http://www.3dmark.com/hall-of-fame-2/) and not only that, but arguing over which parts are the best based on the results of these benchmarks . As it stands, I've come across some third-party databases of user-submitted content that shows relative performance of various parts for folding such as PPD, but the manual nature of these services leads to sparse, and sometimes incomparable, data. It would be cool if you could "opt-in" to have the FAHClient submit statistics along with the WUs containing your hardware IDs and PPD/TPF stats, which would then get entered into a query-able database on the site. Now I would imagine this would require additional resources on the back-end to implement, but it's just a suggestion.

Along those lines, it would also be neat to have a "benchmarking mode" that would simulate a fold (yes, a simulation of a simulation ) for a minute and extrapolate PPD, in a standardized way. This would further aid in hardware comparisons, because I know that some WUs/projects fold better/faster than others.

As a last thought, have you considered contacting Steam (http://store.steampowered.com/about/)? That's the mecca for PC gamers today. You would get a lot more traffic if you got them to publicize F@H. Not too long ago, when they released their Linux client, they had an offer where if you installed Steam on Linux and played one of their games, they'd give you a Tux penguin hat to wear in it. I'm not sure what the numbers are at now, but shortly after the Linux client released, Linux users made up just over 2% of the total user-base (which when you consider that there's over 3 million players in-game on Steam at a single time, is no small number!).

There is a separate folding benchmarking program called FAHBench. It reports ns/day instead of estimated PPD, and it only runs one particular protein, but otherwise I think it's what you're looking for. It's not actually GPU-only, though to benchmark a CPU you have to download additional stuff, and it's not entirely accurate for them because CPU folding uses a different code base. Perhaps it should be linked to from somewhere on the new webpage, as I didn't see it in a cursory search.

As to an automatic benchmark repository, you'd have to account for hardware that doesn't fold 24/7, as that will skew the PPD figures a great deal. That's hardly a show-stopper, but it would need to be taken into account. I imagine that's more work than they want to do at this time on something that doesn't improve the science.